Beneficial Advice for Any Age

From IFPA President Jim Bell, MS

Here's some advise recently dished out at a high school speech about 11 things they did not learn in school. It talks about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality, and how this concept sets them up for failure in the real world.

I had read this sometime ago and had recently come upon it again. This is sage advice that everyone can benefit from regardless of their age…

Life is not fair-get used to it.

The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a Vice President with a great car, until you earn both.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault; so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Before you were born, your parents weren't so boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades, and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

       - Charles Sykes addressing high school students about 11 things they did not learn in school

Additional information from FitBits thanks to one of our readers: These rules are excerpted from a book by Charles Sykes, entitled “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can’t Read, Write or Add.”

I want to leave you with this last motivational quote. We all have much negativity in our lives, let us all make a concerted effort to spread more positives.

“A difficult time can be more readily endured if we retain the conviction that our existence holds a purpose – a cause to pursue, a person to love, a goal to achieve.”